Purpose :
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a medical condition which may result in rapid visual function loss, leading to legal blindness. For wet AMD the progression can effectively be halted by regular (e.g. monthly) intraocular injections of anti-VEGF drugs. An optimal therapy would require an individualized injection scheme, which should be based on OCT diagnosis on anideally daily interval. This is only possible with a home care OCT device. To make a self-diagnosis OCT feasible, the price of OCT devices needs to be reduced to a few thousand Dollars, the device should have the size of a small desktop or handheld unit, and it needs to be so easy to use that untrained elderly people can handle it. This calls for a new concept of the OCT device.

Methods :
One enabling technology for home care devices is Off-Axis Full-Field Time-Domain OCT (OA-FF-TD-OCT). It acquires an en-face image in different depths of the tissue by adapting the path length of the reference arm and using an off-axis reference beam, similar to off-axis holography. It allows a single shot en-face image acquisition and, by simple step-wise changing the reference arm length, a volumetric imaging of the sample.

Results :
We present a hand held OCT device that can be used for retina diagnostics. In volunteers, the central 1.5 x 4.5 mm of the macula were imaged with a resolution of approximately 15 µm in lateral and axial direction. A dense sampled volume scan with a depth of 1.5 mm is measured in less than a second. Although the sensitivity of 80 dB is significantly lower than in clinical OCT devices, image quality is acceptable. All major layers in the retina are clearly visible and the images can supposedly be used for the diagnosis of morphology changes due to wet AMD.

Conclusions :
OA-FF-TD-OCT is a promising novel technology for a simple and robust retina imaging system. The presented device already has the size and usability of a home-care systems. The image quality is sufficient for macular diagnostics. Furthermore, the technology allows a cost-effective design of a commercial system.

This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.